The Chef

by Martin Suter

  Maravan had steeped some dried asparagus in water, puréed it with the wand mixer and extracted the essence using the rotary evaporator. This essence was then combined with ghee and algin, and when the mixture had thickened he shaped it into little asparagus spears whose tips he coloured green with chlorophyll.

  Taking the most popular Ayurvedic means of stimulating sexual arousal – a simple combination of ground liquorice, ghee and honey – he had created ice lollies by making patties, inserting wooden sticks, decorating them with chopped pistachios, then freezing them.

  At twenty to seven he took a shower, changed and opened all the windows in his flat again. The only thing to smell of food should be the food itself.

  5

  On the short walk from the tram stop to Theodorstrasse 94 Andrea was approached by a junkie begging for money, accosted by a dealer and propositioned by a driver. She would book a taxi for the journey home, even if it was still early. And it would be early, she was absolutely determined about this. The moment she entered Maravan’s flat she would tell him that she had almost not come because she was feeling so unwell.

  In the stairwell it smelled as it always did in blocks of flats around this time of the evening. Here, however, the smell was not of meat loaf, but curry. On the first floor, two Tamil women were standing in the half-open doors to their flats, nattering away. On the third floor, a young boy was waiting on the landing; when he saw Andrea he disappeared into his flat, looking disappointed.

  Maravan was waiting for her at his door. He was wearing a colourful shirt and dark trousers. He had just showered and was clean-shaven. He held out his long, slim hand and said, ‘Welcome to Maravan’s Curry Palace.’

  He showed Andrea in, took the wine, and helped her out of her coat. Candles were burning everywhere; just a few spotlights here and there provided some more sober lighting.

  ‘The flat’s not nice if there’s too much light,’ he explained in his Swiss high German with a Tamil twang.

  In the sitting room, a table no more than twenty centimetres high was set for two. The seating was provided by cushions and blankets. On the wall was a domestic shrine with a lit deepam. In the centre of the shrine a four-armed goddess was sitting on a lotus flower.

  ‘Lakshmi,’ Maravan said, making a gesture with his hand as if he were introducing another guest.

  ‘Why has she got four arms?’

  ‘Dharma, Kama, Artha and Moksha. Virtuousness, desire, prosperity and liberation.’

  ‘Right, I see,’ Andrea said, as if she now understood much better.

  On a table by the wall an ice bucket stood next to a computer covered with a batik cloth. Maravan took a bottle of champagne from the ice bucket, wiped it with a white napkin, popped the cork and filled two glasses. She would have preferred the other scenario: no wine in the house; he would have had to open her gift, and she would have been able to talk about feeling groggy with a better conscience.

  When they drank to each other’s health she noticed that all he did was merely moisten his lips.

  He pointed to the table. ‘We eat special meals on the floor. Does it bother you?’

  She briefly considered how he might take it if she said yes, then answered, ‘But I am going to get a knife and fork, aren’t I?’

  It was meant as a joke, but Maravan asked in all seriousness, ‘Do you need them?’

  Did she need a knife and fork? Andrea thought about it for a moment. ‘Where can I wash my hands?’

  Maravan took her to his tiny bathroom. She washed her hands and did what she always did in other people’s bathrooms. She opened the mirror cabinet and inspected the contents: toothpaste, toothbrush, dental floss, shaving soap, shaving brush, razor, nail scissors, two tins with Tamil writing on them, one yellow, the other red. All clean and tidy, like Maravan himself.

  When she returned to the sitting room he had vanished. She opened the door to what she thought was the kitchen, but it was his bedroom. Also tidy, and with just a cupboard, a chair and a bed without a frame. On the wall was a poster of a white beach with a few coconut palms, their crowns almost touching the sand, and in the foreground a weathered catamaran. Along the opposite wall was a row of flowerpots with plants she did not recognize. On the wall behind the pillows a picture of the same Hindu goddess as in the sitting room, a few family photos, women of Maravan’s age, children, teenagers, and Maravan with his arm around a small, white-haired woman. And an older, formal, retouched and coloured studio photograph of a serious-looking young couple, maybe his parents.

  Andrea closed the door and opened another. She entered a room which looked like a miniature version of a professional kitchen. Lots of steel, lots of white, and pots, pans and dishes everywhere. It occurred to her now that this was the only room in the flat that had a smell, even though the balcony door was wide open.

  Maravan came up to her with a tray. ‘A greeting from the kitchen,’ he said, realizing that this phrase sounded a little odd when uttered in a kitchen. They both laughed and Andrea went to sit down at her place.

  The small plates contained five miniature chapattis and nothing more.

  Andrea took one, smelt it, and was about to pop it in her mouth.

  ‘Hold on.’ Maravan took a pipette from a glass container on the tray and squeezed out three drops of liquid onto the chapatti. ‘Now.’

  Straight away an aroma rose from the tiny bread that was so mysterious and yet so familiar that she gave up her plan to make an early exit. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Curry leaves and cinnamon in coconut oil. The smell of my childhood.’

  ‘And how did you capture it?’

  ‘Chef’s secret.’ Maravan squeezed a few drops of the essence on all the chapattis. Then he sat opposite Andrea.

  ‘You must have had a lovely childhood to remember its smell so fondly.’

  Maravan took his time to answer, as if he had to make up his mind whether his childhood had been a lovely one. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘But the little of it that was lovely smelled like this.’

  He told her of his time in Nangay’s kitchens, the large posh one, and the small, crudely constructed one. Midway through a sentence he excused himself, sprang up from his cushions, nipped into the kitchen and came back with the first course.

  It consisted of two intertwined brown ribbons, one hard and crunchy, the other firm but flexible. Both had been made from the same strangely sweet and earthy ingredients, but because of the fundamentally different methods used to prepare them, they tasted like day and night. Andrea could not recall ever having eaten anything so peculiar with such pleasure.

  ‘What’s this called?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Man and woman,’ Maravan answered.

  ‘So which one’s the woman?’

  ‘They both are.’ He poured her some more champagne – Bollinger Special Cuvée, on the Huwyler menu at 130 francs – cleared away the plates and went back into the kitchen. She took a sip and looked at his full glass in which only the odd bubble, filled with candlelight, rose from the bottom.

  ‘And what’s this called?’ she asked when he placed the next dish in front of her.

  ‘North-south.’

  On the plate were three irregular pale yellow shapes, like sulphur stones. When she touched them they felt hard and cold, but when she copied Maravan and bit into them, the contents were lukewarm, light and airy, and the whole thing melted into something softer, more friendly, which had the sweet taste of exotic confectionery.

  Surrounding these small ice spheres were gel cylinders in another shade of yellow, through which yellowy-orange threads of saffron shone in the candlelight. In the mouth they turned into another reward for having had the courage to bite into the lumps of sulphur.

  ‘Did you make this up?’

  ‘The ingredients are from an ancient recipe, it’s only the preparation which is my work.’

  ‘And the name too, I bet.’

  ‘I could have called this one man and woman too.’

  Was
she just imagining it or was there a hint of suggestiveness in his voice? She did not care.

  So far she had found it easy to eat with her hands, all the dishes had been as manageable as finger food. But now Maravan served the curries.

  Three plates, three small portions of curry, each one presented on a platform of a different variety of rice, and decorated with an arc of foam and a glazed sprig.

  ‘Ladies’ fingers curry on sali rice with garlic foam. Poussin curry on sashtika rice with coriander foam. Churaa varai on nivara rice with mint foam,’ announced Maravan.

  ‘What’s churaa varai?’

  ‘Shark.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He waited for her to start eating.

  ‘You first,’ she urged him, and watched him use his thumb, index and middle fingers to form little balls from the rice and curry and put them in his mouth.

  Andrea’s first attempt was pretty clumsy, but as soon as she had taken her first mouthful she stopped focusing on the technique, just the taste. It was as if she could taste every spice. As if each one were exploding individually and the whole thing a continuously changing firework.

  The level of heat was just right. It did not burn her tongue, was scarcely noticeable in fact, only revealing itself at the finish. It also acted as an additional spice, a final intensification of the taste experience, leaving behind a pleasant warmth which gently ebbed in the time it took for Andrea to prepare another mouthful.

  ‘Are you homesick?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but not for the Sri Lanka I left behind. Only for the one I’d like to return to. A peaceful one. A just one.’

  ‘And a united one?’

  Maravan’s right hand moved as if it had become disconnected from his brain and was now executing the task of feeding its owner independently. He had fixed his gaze on his guest and when the mouth spoke, the hand with its morsels waited respectfully and at a discreet distance.

  ‘All three? Peaceful, just and united? That would be nice.’

  ‘But you don’t believe it’s going to happen.’

  Maravan shrugged. As if this were the sign it had been waiting for, the hand set itself in motion, placed a ball of rice in the mouth, and began to make another.

  ‘For a long time I did believe in it. I even gave up my job as a chef in Kerala and went back to Sri Lanka.’

  Maravan told her of his training in Kerala and his career in a number of Ayurvedic wellness resorts. ‘One more year and I would have been the head chef,’ he sighed.

  ‘Why did you go back then?’ Andrea was holding a morsel of chapatti with coriander foam and could not wait to put it in her mouth. She had never realized how much more sensual it was to eat with your hands.

  ‘In 2001 the United National Party won the elections. Everybody thought there would be peace, the LTTE called a ceasefire and peace negotiations began in Oslo. It looked as if finally we would see the Sri Lanka I wanted to return to. And I had to be there at the start of that.’

  He dipped his finger into the finger bowl, dried it with the napkin, piled the plates, and stood up, all in a single flowing movement, or so it appeared to Andrea.

  She watched him disappear into the kitchen. When he came out again a few moments later he was carefully carrying a long, very narrow platter, in the centre of which there was nothing apart from a row of precisely positioned, shiny balls. Looking like mini versions of old ivory billiard balls, they had the consistency of candied fruits, were warm, sweet and spicy, and tasted of butter, cardamom and cinnamon.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I got a job as a commis in a hotel on the west coast.’

  ‘As a commis?’ she interrupted him. ‘I thought you were almost a head chef.’

  ‘But I was a Tamil, too. That wasn’t a big deal in Kerala. But it was in the Singhalese part of Sri Lanka. I spent almost three years working as a commis.’

  Andrea was already onto her second polished ball. ‘You’re an artist.’

  ‘My chance came in 2004. The hotel chain I was with had turned a tea factory in the Highlands into a boutique hotel and they made me chef de partie.’

  ‘So why didn’t you stay?’

  ‘Because of the tsunami.’

  ‘In the Highlands?’

  ‘It destroyed the hotel on the coast, and one of the Singhalese chefs who survived got my job. I had to go back to the north. And from there I watched how both the LTTE and government used all the world’s relief supplies to advance their own political aims. It was then that I knew this wasn’t the Sri Lanka I’d wanted to return to.’ He was nibbling one of the balls now too, and put it back on his plate. ‘And won’t be for a long time.’

  ‘But the tsunami was not that long ago.’

  ‘A little more than three years.’

  ‘So how come you speak such good German?’

  Maravan shrugged. ‘We’ve learnt to adapt. This includes learning languages.’ After a brief pause he uttered the classic example of Swiss dialect: ‘Chuchichäschtli.’

  Andrea laughed. ‘So why Switzerland?’

  ‘There were many Swiss people in the Ayurveda resorts in Kerala and in the hotels in Sri Lanka. I always found them friendly.’

  ‘Here too?’

  Maravan thought about it. ‘Here Tamils are treated better than back home. There’s almost 45,000 of us over here. Tea?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He removed the dirty crockery.

  ‘Do you mind me just sitting here and being waited on?’

  ‘It’s your day off,’ he replied, dashing into the kitchen.

  A short while later he returned with a tray carrying a tea service. ‘White tea. Made with the silver tips of tea leaves from the Highlands near Dimbula,’ he explained, going back into the kitchen and bringing out a plate of sweetmeats for each of them. An ice lolly with sprinkles of green, surrounded by small asparagus with tips a toxic shade of green and dark-red, heart-shaped biscuits.

  ‘I don’t think I can eat any more.’

  ‘You can always eat sweetmeats.’

  He was right. The lolly tasted of liquorice, pistachios and honey, like something you might find at a funfair. The asparagus could be eaten like jelly babies and had an intense flavour of – asparagus. The hearts were sweet and spicy, with the aroma of an Indian market, and tasted – she could find no better word to describe it – frivolous.

  All of a sudden she was aware of the silence that had descended on the room. The wind had also stopped blowing sheets of rain against the window. Something made her say, ‘Would you show me some photos of your family?’

  Without saying a word, Maravan stood up, helped her to her feet, and took her into his bedroom, to the wall with the photographs.

  ‘My brothers and sisters and some of their children. My parents – they died in 1983, their car was set on fire.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they were Tamils.’

  Andrea put her hand on his shoulder and said nothing.

  ‘And the old lady is Na . . .’

  ‘Nangay.’

  ‘She looks like a wise woman.’

  ‘She is.’

  Another silence. Andrea’s gaze wandered to the window. In the weak light that seeped out from the bedroom into the darkness, she could see snowflakes dancing. ‘It’s snowing.’

  Maravan glanced at the window and then drew the curtains. He looked at her uncertainly as he stood there.

  Andrea felt full and satisfied. And yet there was still a tiny hunger niggling away at her. Only now did she realize what it was she was after.

  She went up to him, took his head between her hands and kissed him on the mouth.

  April 2008

  6

  The following morning the news broke that the country’s largest bank had to write off a further 19 billion francs, and borrow 15 billion more. It cost the bank’s president his job. It was to be a bad day for Maravan too.

  He had slipped out of the bedroom before six o’clock and made egg hoppers
with sothi and coconut chutney. When he left the kitchen with the tray he almost crashed into Andrea. She was fully dressed.

  He could think of nothing better to say than ‘Hoppers?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m not really the breakfast type.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all he replied. The two of them looked at each other for a while without saying anything. It was Andrea who broke the silence.

  ‘I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks for the fantastic dinner.’

  ‘Thanks for coming. Are you on early today?’

  ‘No, late.’

  ‘See you this afternoon, then.’

  Andrea hesitated, as if there was something else she wanted to get off her chest. ‘Maravan . . .’ she began. But she thought better of it, kissed him stiffly on both cheeks, and left.

  From his window he watched her exit the building and trudge over to the tram stop, her hands buried deep in her coat pockets. A dismal day, but the street was dry.

  Maravan went into the kitchen and did those same chores that were his responsibility at the Huwyler: scrubbing, washing and putting away the pots and pans.

  It was the first time he had slept with a woman since fleeing Sri Lanka. And even the times before that he could count on one hand. Three times in southern India, twice in Sri Lanka; four of them were prostitutes, one a tourist. She was from England, around forty years old, and had told him her name was Caroline. But the tag on her suitcase had said Jennifer Hill.

  This was also the first time he had felt good about it afterwards. No bad conscience. Without feeling the need to stand under the shower for hours. He was not surprised; it was the first time it had had anything to do with love.

  Which is why Andrea’s behaviour hit him particularly hard. Had he just experienced what other single Tamil men had told him about? Had he been exploited for a little bit of exotic amusement?

  The morning was so gloomy he had to turn on the light to clean the rotary evaporator. He packed away the equipment, well padded in fresh clothes and the clean Turkish towel in his gym bag.

  When he left the house it was raining again. It was still early and he wanted to be the first one there, straight after Frau Keller. She ran the administrative side of the Huwyler and worked normal office hours. She unlocked the delivery entrance at 8.15 on the dot. That would give Maravan enough time to put the rotary evaporator back in its place.